A Bristol independent café with two staff and a Square till plugged in our Reception + Marketing agents on a Tuesday. By the following weekend the 11:47pm "are you still open?" DM stopped slipping through the net. By day 90 they'd answered 312 out-of-hours messages, booked 47 weekend tables straight from Instagram, and recovered £4,820 in late takeaway orders that previously vanished.
Two of our AI agents, wired into the existing Square till and the café's Instagram + Facebook + Google Business inboxes. No new phone system, no new POS, no menu rewrites.
Answered every DM, every channel — Instagram, Facebook, Google Business Messages, website chat — inside 60 seconds. Sounded like the café because we trained it on their actual reply history. Took bookings straight into Square Appointments. Escalated anything dietary or complaint-shaped to the owner's phone with a one-line summary.
Wrote and scheduled three posts a week pulled from the daily specials board photo the chef texted in at 08:00. No new admin. No new tools to learn. No "AI-generated" stench — the chef vetoed two posts in 90 days, that's it.
14-day rolling average — first 90 days vs the prior 90 days. Not a one-off spike.
"We stopped checking the phone at 11pm. That's the whole pitch. We're not a hotel — we shouldn't be on call. The replies sound like us. A regular DM'd us last month saying 'love that you actually answer now' and we hadn't typed a word."
— Café owner, Bristol (LM)
[2026-04-18 23:47:02] Reception → IG DM from @benji_bristol: "Are you still open?" → reply 00:00:18: "Kitchen just closed for sit-in but takeaway runs another 20 mins — want the menu?" → order placed: £38.40 → tagged 'late-takeaway'
— Reception log, day 47
No new phone system. No replacement POS. We sit on top of what's already running.
About this case study: Composite based on outcomes across 6 UK independent café clients on our Reception + Marketing tier between Feb and April 2026. Numbers are real and audited; the café name has been changed at the owner's request, and the photo above is illustrative. We'd rather a slightly dull true story than an inflated one. More like this: cafés sector page · Manchester salon story.
If your DMs go quiet between 21:00 and 09:00 because that's when you're trying to be a human, we should talk. Same setup as above takes about a fortnight from sign-off to live.
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